[Mailman-Users] Hardware Requirements

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 11 Jul 2002 13:32:35 -0400 
Scott Courtney <courtney at 4th.com> wrote:
> On Thursday 11 July 2002 11:59 am, J C Lawrence wrote:
>> On Thu, 11 Jul 2002 08:43:06 -0400

> And from your comments, it appears that my first suspicion of my own
> idea was correct: it's not practical. Thanks for the enlightenment
> about Sendmail internals; I didn't realize it did so many explicity
> sync() calls.

You might to look over the RFCs for SMTP and pay particular attention to
the bits about guarantees and transaction handling.  At each one of
those points the systems on both ends have to push the current message
state down to metal (or RAID cache etc) and synchronise their states in
case one or both of the systems suffers a sudden catastrophic failure
(eg power cord pulled) at just the wrong moment.

It tends to define a whole lot of sync() and open()/close() calls (which
latter force a buffer and inode flush).

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.